Jiacen Xu

Margarita Geleta, Jiacen Xu, Manikanta Loya et al.

Although the prevention of AI vulnerabilities is critical to preserve the safety and privacy of users and businesses, educational tools for robust AI are still underdeveloped worldwide. We present the design, implementation, and assessment of Maestro. Maestro is an effective open-source game-based platform that contributes to the advancement of robust AI education. Maestro provides goal-based scenarios where college students are exposed to challenging life-inspired assignments in a competitive programming environment. We assessed Maestro's influence on students' engagement, motivation, and learning success in robust AI. This work also provides insights into the design features of online learning tools that promote active learning opportunities in the robust AI domain. We analyzed the reflection responses (measured with Likert scales) of 147 undergraduate students using Maestro in two quarterly college courses in AI. According to the results, students who felt the acquisition of new skills in robust AI tended to appreciate highly Maestro and scored highly on material consolidation, curiosity, and mastery in robust AI. Moreover, the leaderboard, our key gamification element in Maestro, has effectively contributed to students' engagement and learning. Results also indicate that Maestro can be effectively adapted to any course length and depth without losing its educational quality.

Ruoxi Jia, Fan Wu, Xuehui Sun et al.

Quantifying the importance of each training point to a learning task is a fundamental problem in machine learning and the estimated importance scores have been leveraged to guide a range of data workflows such as data summarization and domain adaption. One simple idea is to use the leave-one-out error of each training point to indicate its importance. Recent work has also proposed to use the Shapley value, as it defines a unique value distribution scheme that satisfies a set of appealing properties. However, calculating Shapley values is often expensive, which limits its applicability in real-world applications at scale. Multiple heuristics to improve the scalability of calculating Shapley values have been proposed recently, with the potential risk of compromising their utility in real-world applications. \textit{How well do existing data quantification methods perform on existing workflows? How do these methods compare with each other, empirically and theoretically? Must we sacrifice scalability for the utility in these workflows when using these methods?} In this paper, we conduct a novel theoretical analysis comparing the utility of different importance quantification methods, and report extensive experimental studies on existing and proposed workflows such as noisy label detection, watermark removal, data summarization, data acquisition, and domain adaptation. We show that Shapley value approximation based on a $K$NN surrogate over pre-trained feature embeddings obtains comparable utility with existing algorithms while achieving significant scalability improvement, often by orders of magnitude. Our theoretical analysis also justifies its advantage over the leave-one-out error. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/AI-secure/Shapley-Study}.

Jingkang Wang, Tianyun Zhang, Sijia Liu et al.

The worst-case training principle that minimizes the maximal adversarial loss, also known as adversarial training (AT), has shown to be a state-of-the-art approach for enhancing adversarial robustness. Nevertheless, min-max optimization beyond the purpose of AT has not been rigorously explored in the adversarial context. In this paper, we show how a general framework of min-max optimization over multiple domains can be leveraged to advance the design of different types of adversarial attacks. In particular, given a set of risk sources, minimizing the worst-case attack loss can be reformulated as a min-max problem by introducing domain weights that are maximized over the probability simplex of the domain set. We showcase this unified framework in three attack generation problems -- attacking model ensembles, devising universal perturbation under multiple inputs, and crafting attacks resilient to data transformations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach leads to substantial attack improvement over the existing heuristic strategies as well as robustness improvement over state-of-the-art defense methods trained to be robust against multiple perturbation types. Furthermore, we find that the self-adjusted domain weights learned from our min-max framework can provide a holistic tool to explain the difficulty level of attack across domains. Code is available at https://github.com/wangjksjtu/minmax-adv.

Jiacen Xu, Jack W. Stokes, Geoff McDonald et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive results on natural language tasks, and security researchers are beginning to employ them in both offensive and defensive systems. In cyber-security, there have been multiple research efforts that utilize LLMs focusing on the pre-breach stage of attacks like phishing and malware generation. However, so far there lacks a comprehensive study regarding whether LLM-based systems can be leveraged to simulate the post-breach stage of attacks that are typically human-operated, or "hands-on-keyboard" attacks, under various attack techniques and environments. As LLMs inevitably advance, they may be able to automate both the pre- and post-breach attack stages. This shift may transform organizational attacks from rare, expert-led events to frequent, automated operations requiring no expertise and executed at automation speed and scale. This risks fundamentally changing global computer security and correspondingly causing substantial economic impacts, and a goal of this work is to better understand these risks now so we can better prepare for these inevitable ever-more-capable LLMs on the horizon. On the immediate impact side, this research serves three purposes. First, an automated LLM-based, post-breach exploitation framework can help analysts quickly test and continually improve their organization's network security posture against previously unseen attacks. Second, an LLM-based penetration test system can extend the effectiveness of red teams with a limited number of human analysts. Finally, this research can help defensive systems and teams learn to detect novel attack behaviors preemptively before their use in the wild....

Boyi Wei, Benedikt Stroebl, Jiacen Xu et al. · princeton

Foundation models are increasingly becoming better autonomous programmers, raising the prospect that they could also automate dangerous offensive cyber-operations. Current frontier model audits probe the cybersecurity risks of such agents, but most fail to account for the degrees of freedom available to adversaries in the real world. In particular, with strong verifiers and financial incentives, agents for offensive cybersecurity are amenable to iterative improvement by would-be adversaries. We argue that assessments should take into account an expanded threat model in the context of cybersecurity, emphasizing the varying degrees of freedom that an adversary may possess in stateful and non-stateful environments within a fixed compute budget. We show that even with a relatively small compute budget (8 H100 GPU Hours in our study), adversaries can improve an agent's cybersecurity capability on InterCode CTF by more than 40\% relative to the baseline -- without any external assistance. These results highlight the need to evaluate agents' cybersecurity risk in a dynamic manner, painting a more representative picture of risk.

Jiacen Xu, Zhe Zhou, Boyuan Feng et al.

Recent research efforts on 3D point cloud semantic segmentation (PCSS) have achieved outstanding performance by adopting neural networks. However, the robustness of these complex models have not been systematically analyzed. Given that PCSS has been applied in many safety-critical applications like autonomous driving, it is important to fill this knowledge gap, especially, how these models are affected under adversarial samples. As such, we present a comparative study of PCSS robustness. First, we formally define the attacker's objective under performance degradation and object hiding. Then, we develop new attack by whether to bound the norm. We evaluate different attack options on two datasets and three PCSS models. We found all the models are vulnerable and attacking point color is more effective. With this study, we call the attention of the research community to develop new approaches to harden PCSS models.